IF YOU HATE GROWING OLDER.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 17835, 1 May 1926, Page 18 (Supplement)

IF YOU HATE GROWING OLDER.

“What rubbish it is I" so I heard a more than ordinarily int M ;gent man say the other day, “to speak as if there were anything beautiful about okl age! There, is no beauty in old age, only decay.”

The woman to whom he was speaking was younger than himself, yet was in her late rather than early youth. Her beautiful eyes grew more and more solemn as she listened, for growing old comes harder to a woman than it does to a man.

“Well, well," said he. "we must just make the best of it. and keep as cheerful as we can." She agreed, looking anything but cheerfuL They paid me the silent tribute of considering me too sensible to differ from them.

But I did differ from them. Net, of course, about the sadness that there is in the decay of bodily beauty. The passing of beauty is almost unbearably sad, but we should not know it to be sad at all. we should not know beauty to be beauty if we had not minds that could perceive it. The more experienced the mind, the more perceptive it is, and the more susceptible to beauty. A day or two before I happened to hear this dismal little conversation—for if there is anything more dismal than p\xmped-up “cheerfulness" I havevet to meet it —I had been listening to a speech by a man of fifty-something and of genius. The speech was interesting, stimulating, suited to the occasion, but not of great importance. It was the man himself who was important. His extremely attractive face had the fifty-something look as well as the look of genius. To imagine that he had been more attractive ten or twenty years ago was an impossibility.

Like all people possessed of any sort of greatness, he had, during the passing years, unknowingly intensified the appeal that he has for his fellow-humans. When we think of the passing of youth we should nerve ourselves with the thought of this inner beauty, which, in great measure, is created by the passing years which we so much hate. A genius is, of course, an exceptional per-

son, but those of us who have sufficient intelligence to love beauty of any kind have enough of it. to steel ourselves against the thought of old age—which is a different thing altogether from deciding to make the best of a bad job.